Well I had no problems getting a card on Jan 9th, and it was a non ref 7970, it was dealing with my second card (non ref) that was a prob.
My bro in law had no probs getting a ref design card on launch, and I had ordered a second one for him a few days later with no prob.
So from my experience, it was no difference than the GTX 680 really.

Well considering that was 3 weeks after (Jan9th you say) launch...

And there is a lot more popularity in the GTX series, due to there performance.

-ST

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Direct Canada got some in this morning they are reporting MSI GeForce GTX 680 Twin Frozr III OC in stock at the time of this post, not the card I’m waiting for but if anyone is interested don’t think they will last long.

!!! Thank you! I kind of gave up on directCanada since it seemed as though they weren't going to be stocking 680s for a while. Was so excited to see that it was still in stock I just jumped right for it, haha. Hopefully I won't have any buyer's remorse... oh well. Registered just to thank you for posting that! I'm so pumped right now.

Actually, I beg to differ. Every one of my retailer contacts has stated that the GTX 680 has ALREADY outsold the HD 7970.

The HD 7970 wasn't a popular card and nonetheless suffered from a lack of availability until about a week before the GTX 680 launch. It was also "launched" in 2011 but wasn't actually put on sale until early 2012. THAT is a paper launch. On that date, every retailer had a few dozen, no more.

Several large retailers had hundreds of GTX 680 cards available at launch. A paper launch that is not...

Well I had no problems getting a card on Jan 9th, and it was a non ref 7970, it was dealing with my second card (non ref) that was a prob.
My bro in law had no probs getting a ref design card on launch, and I had ordered a second one for him a few days later with no prob.
So from my experience, it was no difference than the GTX 680 really.

/sigh. Ok. Lets make it simple.

The 7970 was released on Dec 21. Not Jan 9th. A paper launch / soft launch is when you can NOT get a card on the day it is released. Not because the retailers sold out but because they didnt get any cards. A three week delay between launch and hitting shelves is a paper launch. The 7970 was a paper launch. It was done for PR. AMD wanted to brag they had their new tech out a "year" before NV.

NV has done paper launches in the past. The 6 series was a hard launch. If you were lucky you COULD buy one as the reailers had stock....not as much as needed but they had stock -and had more coming quickly. Thus it was a hard launch.

Simple concept.

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Well Sky's review says it was originally set for early Jan, then they brought it in, then put it back to Jan 9th, so does that not mean mean it wasn't a paper launch since really they originally wanted an early Jan release.
Again, my experience was I had no issues finding a reference 7970 upon launch and throughout the launch week. I stopped looking at ref stock at that point since I was strictly looking at non ref designs.

But whatever, who really cares anyway, it's just a GPU, not a big deal if it's a paper launch or not in my eyes.